Profiled steel rods, such as concrete reinforcing rods, are generally conducted away from their final processing stage in a rod-handling facility by means of a multi-roll conveyor which usually includes a plurality of driven and/or idle feed rolls. In order thereafter to facilitate the removal of such rods from the conveyor, the latter is usually associated with means for displacing or casting the finished rods laterally off the conveyor without manual intervention. Such means generally include a plurality of displacement elements or traverse members interspersed between the adjacent feed rolls and arranged to be raised and lowered relative to the conveyor rolls from an inactive position below the conveyor to an active position above the conveyor. When the traverse members are in their raised condition, their appropriately slanted upper surfaces define an inclined plane above the conveyor rolls so as to cause any rod engaged by the traverse members to be shifted off the conveyor to one side thereof or the other.
In a known arrangement of this type, the traverse members are vertically disposed metal plates, the upper edges of which are inclined to the horizontal. The metal plates are divided into two sets, with their upper edges being inclined in alternatingly opposite directions. Thus, when one set of these metal plates is raised, they define an inclined plane slanting to one side of the conveyor, while when the other set of metal plates is raised, they define an inclined plane slanting to the other side of the conveyor. Such an arrangement of metal plates is quite bulky and heavy, of course, and thus is not only expensive to produce, install and maintain but also mandates extra expenditures with respect to the size and strength of the piston and cylinder combinations and the associated fluid pressure systems which are required to raise and lower the individual plates.